"Partly, people aren't reading the directions, and, two, they don't want to pick a party," she said.

State law requires voters in the primary to stay within one party in selecting candidates for partisan races. With touch-screen voting machines in use before the switch, each voter had to select a party before being allowed to pick candidates.

This is the third year voters in the state have had to pick a party since the open primary, in which voters were able for decades to choose from among all candidates from all parties for each partisan office, was found unconstitutional.

Some voters write angrily on ballots about being forced to choose a party affiliation, and election workers have received as many as 250 telephone complaints on that issue since ballots were mailed Aug. 30, Diepenbrock said.